In recent years, individuals and businesses have begun using video-conferencing technologies to increase efficiency and productivity. In particular, video-conferencing technologies allow people at a first location to simultaneously converse with people at other locations in nearly real time, without wearing facesets or using handheld communication devices. Video conferencing can be as simple as a conversation between two people in different locations point-to-point) or involve several locations (multi-point) with more than one person at each location. Video-conference communication is becoming more affordable to a wide range of users including individuals and businesses, because high-speed Internet connectivity has become more widely available at a reasonable cost, and because the hardware used for this technology has continued to improve in quality at ever lower costs. Carefully designed video-conferencing rooms with large displays can be used to present the video-conference participants with approximately the same size as they would appear if they were in the same room.
However, many video-conferencing technology users argue that a number of issues prevent current video-conferencing technology from becoming a standard part of communication. One major issue is lack of eye contact, which plays a major role in conversational communications, perceived attention and intent, and other important aspects of natural face-to-face communication. For example, consider a first person and a second person participating in a video conference. When the first person looks at a display screen of the second person, the first person is not looking at the camera, resulting in the second person getting a view of the first person without eye contact. On the other hand, when the first person looks at the camera, the first person at best gets a peripheral view of the second person exhibited on the display. Another major issue is gaze awareness. For example, conveying the focus of a remote user's attention (or lack of attention) with regard to shared content, such as a shared document, is an important part of establishing the intersubjectivity required for effective communication. Typically, shared content is displayed separately from the user's displays and the gaze direction is rarely conveyed correctly at each location. Thus, typical video-conferencing technologies are arguably worse than traditional audio conferencing technologies that provide no eye contact cues, because typical video-conferencing technologies create the false impression that participants are either avoiding eye contact or are distracted.
Designers and users of video-conference technologies continue to seek improvements to the video-conferencing experience.